Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Sunday, January 06, 2013

A right-wing advocacy group is making a case for using dollars from a Toronto casino to build subways.

A policy paper released Sunday by the Toronto Taxpayers Coalition argues that a “Transit Funding Trifecta” of “innovative revenue sources” could bring in as much as $400 million a year for the city’s subway system without costing taxpayers a cent.

OTTAWA - The navy's long-delayed, much-studied joint support ship program is expected to come under the political microscope within weeks in what is likely another defence equipment embarrassment for the Harper government.

The parliamentary budget officer has been examining the program and is poised to release his findings once MPs return from their Christmas break.

Kevin Page's incendiary analysis of the F-35 fighter jet program sparked a raging political fire which continues to burn.

Another day, another corporate titan suffering from devastating amnesia. This time, the memory-loss patient is none other than Angelo Mozilo, the former CEO of Countrywide Financial.

Deposed in the landmark lawsuit between the monoline insurer MBIA and Countrywide/Bank of America, Mozilo professed not to know the difference between "verified" income and "stated" income. He also made some incredible remarks regarding his notorious "Friends of Angelo" lending program, in which, among others, political figures like North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad and Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd received Countrywide mortgages on highly advantageous terms just because they were tight with the CEO.

The Conservative government is creating an Office of Religious Freedom (ORF), fulfilling a promise made in the 2011 election campaign. The stated intention of Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is to create an organization that will monitor and criticize religious persecution and to promote religious freedom around the world. There are some genuine questions about the wisdom of this idea, a fact that may also explain why the government has been so slow in fulfilling its promise.

I hate when right-wing pundits whine and complain about someone’s
wages. Regardless of legitimacy of the points raised, these arguments
are nearly always made to obscure a debate.

Part of the response to the Idle No More campaign has included this
strategy. For Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, the chorus of trolls at
Sun TV are using her salary as an argument for why her hunger strike
should be ignored.

WASHINGTON -- There will be no more increases in tax revenues as part of any debt or deficit-reduction deal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared in several interviews on Sunday.

“[T]he tax issue is finished, over, completed,” said the Kentucky Republican, during an appearance on ABC’s "This Week." "That's behind us. Now the question is, what are we going to do about the biggest problem confronting our country and our future? And that's our spending addiction. It's time to confront it. The president surely knows that. I mean, he has mentioned it both publicly and privately. The time to confront it is now."

At present, one of the major Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) processing terminal and shale gas pipeline undertakings in northern B.C. is the Kitimat LNG/Pacific Trails Pipeline project. KLNG/PTP was until very recently owned by a consortium including EOG Resources, Encana Corporation, and majority owner Apache Corporation. The scheme would aim for PTP to connect shale gas from the existing Spectra Energy transmission system near Summit Lake, BC, to its processing terminal in Kitimat on the west coast. From there, the LNG is to be loaded onto tankers via the dubious Douglas Channel, and bound for Asian markets.

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Those words were delivered on June 11, 2008, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he stood in the House of Commons and apologized to aboriginal peoples for the harm inflicted by Canada’s policy of assimilating their children.

The speech was historic. It was simple, straightforward and from the heart. It felt like a turning point.

More than a thousand VIA Rail travellers were stranded on four trains Saturday night when Idle No More protesters blocked off the main rail route between Toronto and Montreal.

About a dozen protesters took over the tracks in Marysville, near Kingston, around 4:30 p.m., forcing VIA Rail to dispatch 20 buses to transport passengers to their respective destinations, which included Toronto’s Union Station, Ottawa and Montreal.

The Conservative government’s program to buy new trucks for the army, originally announced in 2006 but stalled ever since, is being rebooted but federal officials are at a loss to say when such vehicles may be delivered.

Public Works asked truck companies Friday to meet in Ottawa in mid-January so they can have consultations over how to best move ahead on the multi-million dollar purchase.

Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, sent a letter on Thursday to the governor general and prime minister, inviting them to a meeting on Jan. 24, in the hope that it would convince Chief Theresa Spence to end her hunger strike, which was then in its 24th day.

On Victoria Island, across the river from Parliament Hill, Spence sat in her teepee while her supporters warmed themselves around a fire, drumming and chanting in the cold, chatting in Cree, English and French.

The Idle No More protest movement continued to gain steam with more demonstrations Saturday, after it was announced Prime Minister Stephen Harper would meet with a delegation of First Nations chiefs, including Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, who is now on day 26 of a hunger strike.

Idle No More protesters staged a railroad blockade Saturday evening in Marysville, Ont., near Kingston. Via Rail trains travelling the Toronto-Montreal and Toronto-Ottawa corridors were disrupted.

On Sunday — to celebrate Armenian Christmas — Sevan Hajinian intends to walk into Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church in east Toronto and give thanks to those who made a potentially life-changing back surgery possible.

The province of Ontario will not be among them.

Friends and supporters, with the help of the church, raised $120,000 for a Dec. 4 surgery in New York City, which Hajinian says five Canadian spinal surgeons would not touch and the Ontario Health Insurance Plan would not fund.

WASHINGTON — Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.

In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.

What a difference third-party status makes. The last time the Liberals held an all-out leadership race, in 2006, it was about replacing Stephen Harper's frail minority and wielding power. Now even Justin Trudeau says, "This is about who's going to be leader of the third party." (An impressively long view from somebody who's supposed to lack maturity.) But what are the real stakes? It's about who will be the future Liberal Party of Canada.

In Cairo, there is a street named after the Arab League. It’s a grand boulevard that cuts through Mohandiseen, a neighborhood built in the 1950s to house engineers and other civil servants, whose ranks swelled during the 1960s with the guarantee of employment under the state socialism of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. These days, the boulevard is lined with luxury car showrooms, drab mid-rises and fast-food chains, all forming the commercial spine of an upscale area too expensive for most clerks and bureaucrats. Last December, on one of the quiet streets that radiates off the boulevard, I visited the office of an architect named Dina Shehayeb. A professor at the Housing and Building National Research Center in Cairo, Shehayeb also runs her own firm, which focuses on community-based development and the revitalization of historic areas. The deadly street battles of late November between the police and unarmed protesters on Mohamed Mahmoud Street near Tahrir Square had ended, and the attacks on protesters by military police outside the People’s Assembly near Tahrir were a week away. Cairo was relatively calm. But in her office, Shehayeb spoke heatedly of a city transformed during the reign of the recently deposed president, Hosni Mubarak.